is there a jewish newspaper in the u.s. that would even consider printing a piece like the one i’ve copied in below, which ran in ha-aretz on february 13, 2009? if one did, would it ever run another one? how many institutional advertisers would it lose? how many major u.s. jewish organizations would condemn it? […]

now, the statue of limitations on all of our semi-rational exuberance over the symbolism of the current presidency has not yet run out. i figure, based on my friends and family, that it has somewhere between three and nine months left. so i’m not expecting anyone to do anything about this right now. once the memories of the election-night street parties are a little bit more faded, though, it’ll be useful to have these pieces of information ready to hand.

i don’t love posting press releases, but as a new yorker this makes me happy. not as proud as i’d be were i in toronto, montréal, LA or san francisco, but nonetheless. after last week’s demonstration, which brought together the full range of jewish opposition to the israeli government’s war on gaza, from Women in […]

I’ve been wanting to write about the current war in Gaza for a while now, but it’s been hard to find the words for what I wanted to say. But today I started writing a letter to a friend, and found that in addressing a single person I was able to find words. So this […]

to me, there’s only one thing worth saying on the journalistic side:
24 israelis have been killed by rocket or mortar attacks from gaza, ever.
more than 300 palestinians have been killed by the israeli blitzkrieg in gaza in the past 2 days.
more than 3,300 palestinians have been killed by the israeli military in gaza since 2000.
and it needs to be said over and over and over again.

(Omer Goldman, Tamar Katz, Sahar Vardi, Raz Bar-David Varon, Yuval Ophir-Auron) In the U.S., those who refuse to serve, we call them conscientious objectors. In Israel, young high school students who refuse to serve in the Israeli military in opposition to the occupation of Palestinian Territories are called Shministim. From Howard Zinn who wrote eloquently […]

Sixteen years after the atom bomb was dropped on Japan, the Twilight Zone episode “A Quality of Mercy” aired in the United States. The story was set at the end of World War II and involved an American soldier who found himself more or less literally walking in the shoes of a Japanese soldier. In […]

Before Shabbas, and before Yom Hashoah, I wanted to share with you an essay written by Adrienne Rich in the Winter 2007 Newsletter of Poets Against War. From their website: Poets Against War began in late January 2003, when Sam Hamill, longtime pacifist, declined an invitation to a symposium by Laura Bush to celebrate “Poetry […]